


The World I Have

by emrisemrisemris



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Dishonored 2, Emperor Corvo, Gen, High Chaos, I'm so late to this fandom, Your Daughter Is Safe, a bad ending, epilogues for the god of epilogues, history repeats itself once as tragedy and the second time still as tragedy, post Dishonored 2, the road to hell is paved with good intentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 13:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18851947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emrisemrisemris/pseuds/emrisemrisemris
Summary: The Outsider sees through the interstices of a thousand worlds.Corvo has only one.





	The World I Have

The painting warped and for a moment everything shook, stretching and cracking, as if it were on the point of coming apart into splinters, a snake shedding its scales, a clay mould beginning to crack as the thing it had cast started to flex and shoulder its way free. Another world under the skin of this one, waiting for its moment; a world that wanted, wanted so hard he could feel it, to step into the empty frame of reality and set about perfecting it with fire and sword. He thought, suddenly, of Alexandra Hypatia, who would be a haunt-eyed invalid for the rest of her life, never able to forget what had looked out from behind her eyes when the serum woke it.

On the shell of the throne the runes burned, burning black, shuddering in their sockets, and then quite suddenly it was over and the world was still again.

He pried them out of the housing of the throne, piling them on the cushion where generations of Emperors and Empresses had pronounced their decrees, and then swept them into his pouch, and the dim surroundings of the hall fell away from around him in a rain of black splinters.

"Wherever things of power are gathered in my name, there I am," said the Outsider. He sat on a stone mockery of the throne, lounging as if he belonged there, as a jagged island of floor drifted slowly onwards through the familiar cloudy nothingness of the Void. "Congratulations, Corvo. You've destroyed one of the most spectacular feats of magic the world has ever seen." He leaned forward, black eyes glittering like oil. "You've seen yourself how far the ripples can spread when time changes even a little. One man goes to a meeting - or doesn't go - and the fates of nations shift like sand in the wind. How different things could have been, if they'd crowned Delilah instead of your Jessamine. Can you be so sure they wouldn't have been better?"

"Yes," Corvo ground out. "Delilah's a monster."

"And she was younger than Emily is now when she found out her father wasn't going to save her, and set out to take back what was hers even if she had to wade through blood." The Outsider fragmented, and a moment later his voice sounded again from behind. Corvo turned to find the god leaning companionably on a statue that burst from the ground like a fountain of stone, hands grasping uselessly at air, and stared into his own carved face. "If Delilah had recognised in that moment that you were the greater threat, and Emily had gone to Karnaca ... well." He looked at the statue, then back at Corvo, eyes wide. "There are worlds where your precious daughter has cut a bloody swathe through two cities and offered me Delilah's life with the throne of the Empire for an altar, and they're only a breath away."

"I know what Delilah did and that's all that matters." Once again the dissolution, the island rotating around him into somewhere else. Marble flags. The summerhouse where he'd met Jessamine on that morning; she was looking out over the harbour, her back to him, frozen in the breath before her last. The Outsider stood next to her. "You may know what could've been different. I can't. All I can do is protect the world I have."

She turned, a smile breaking across her face, and it wasn't Jessamine but Delilah, every inch the Empress, lines around her eyes, telling him in a voice that echoed as if from rooms away that the plague had worsened while he was gone -

He stared into her unseeing eyes, and she dissolved into shadows.

"You _dare,_ " Corvo rasped.

"You wanted to know," the Outsider said. "Goodbye, Corvo."

*

The returning world had a strange, oversaturated quality, the colours too bright and the shadows mere suggestions, and the painting on the wall was brighter still.

Delilah sat in state on the throne of the Empire, smiling and serene. Courtiers or advisors, silhouettes without faces, hovered at the corners of the picture without seeming fully finished. Had she understood fully what she was creating? Or had she dreamt for so long of this single scene - Delilah, Empress, triumphant - that all the other business of a different world had faded into irrelevance?

Or - no; not triumphant. He stepped closer to the painting, tracing the details with one bloodied hand. He had thought her imagining a world where she had crushed her foes, where he was not a thorn in her side, where instead of panic and poison and resistance the people had simply acknowledged her as their rightful ruler. But she had painted the throne room not as it had been when she had declared herself, but as it had been when Jessamine was a girl. He remembered those worn panels and darkened banners from the first months after he'd come to Dunwall, before Jessamine had been crowned, before she'd set to making the Tower her own as new rulers did.

She'd painted herself younger, too, in the fashions of those early days.

Not an Empress who had vanquished her enemies, but an Empress who had never had enemies at all. A dream not of conquest, but of safety. Would she even remember what she had done, here in the true world that had poisoned her? Or, like Meagan and Aramis Stilton, have never so much as an inkling of the horrors that might have been?

He had given her peace, and the kind of security affordable only in the soft embrace of a child's dreams.

He had given her something Emily would never have.

Could never have, not while time dragged them inexorably on over the wreckage Delilah had left of her unwanted life. She would always be the Empress whose mother had been murdered in front of her; always the Empress who had been stricken in her own court by witches and traitors.

Delilah's witches still infested the Tower; who knew if all of them had lost their connection to the Void when their mistress vanished? Feral dogs, too, and the bone-hounds that grew from the burning skulls. Even say that everything touched by Delilah's hand had vanished with her; even say that her acolytes and her creatures and her coiling plants had all crumbled into the shadows she had conjured them from; even then, the Tower was still a wreck, Dunwall a wasteland of boarded doors and cowering people, the City Watch in ruins, the Overseers dead or fled, the harbours empty as ships kept their distance from the cursed place. Emily would be returning to carnage and scarcity, a target on her back.

Dunwall Tower's walls were worthless. He'd proved that twice. Armour, useless, when his enemies wielded powers the equal of his own. Neither the Watch's weapons nor the Overseers' music had been enough to save them. Jindosh's Clockwork Soldiers were mindless and easily confused, Sokolov's contraptions only as potent as the people who tended them, and people were weak and died easily.

Once, many years ago, as a teenage rookie in the Grand Guard, he'd been ordered to stay with a wounded comrade while the squad medic was summoned. He'd gone to pull the crossbow bolt out of the woman's thigh, and the corporal had stopped him, catching his wrist vice-tight before he could touch it. Then the corporal had explained: until the medic got there, what could they do to seal the wound more closely than the bolt was already doing itself? It would have to come out before the wound sickened, but that took time, and bleeding to death from a wound to a major artery took much, much less ...

What could he do for Emily that could keep her safer than she was now? Stone neither sickened nor bled.

At the very least he should wait, bring back a doctor, or someone who knew how to heal in other ways, if Delilah had let any of the city's sorcerers live who were not her coven.

A doctor. Trustworthy witnesses, too, who could testify that it was the real Emily released from the enchantment, and not some accomplice of his own he'd produced in a ploy to take the throne by subterfuge. He had - well, _had_ had - no shortage of enemies amongst the nobles of the Isles, and both Delilah and even the architects of the old coup had their sympathisers still. They would never believe it was the real Emily unless they saw the transformation for themselves.

She would understand. He'd trained her enough on the need for care, for time, on how meticulous preparation beforehand might be the difference between life and death a decade later.

Corvo stared into his daughter's eyes, at the blank grey stone that should have been full of life, and finally steeled his spine and looked away.

Set his shoulders.

Turned his back.

Walked out of the throne room into a new world.

*

He never claimed the title of Emperor. He was not a usurper. But the Kaldwin line had run out, and gradually the council of nobles acclimated themselves to the idea that there should be an Emperor, really; that the long regency was unseemly somehow, and the serious-faced men and women who made the Empire's laws opened their green-bound casebooks and confirmed that while there was plenty of _tradition_ , when it came down to it, possession of the Throne was rather more then nine-tenths of the law.

There were street parades in Serkonos. In all the time the southernmost island had been a province of the Empire, it had never had a child of the Windy Island sit the throne. Duke Abele, unable to attend the coronation in person due to declining health, sent Aramis Stilton and a spectacular amount of silver.

Corvo looked for a pale figure with ink-pool eyes amongst the assembled crowds, certain that the god would be there somewhere, but did not see him.

*

_And so,_ said the voice, as if it were reciting a story for children, _after the chaos following directly on the coup against the Empress had quieted, the Lord Regent took up his new title and shouldered the heavy burden of the Imperial seal, to steer the ship of state away from the shoals until such time as Empress Emily was fit to take her throne. And the first thing he ordered was executions: firstly, the remainder of the cabal of witch-assassins who had been the hands of the traitors, and secondly, the disloyal ones amongst the nobility, amongst the industrialists, who had been their hearts and voices. And after that, anyone whose loyalty to the new order could not be proven to his satisfaction, and here we are._

A phantom, backed like a stage set by the palace wall and grey as if it had been carved out of smoke, drifted through the perpetual lowering stormclouds. No dream had ever felt this solid, no figment of the imagination so real. Was this death? It didn't feel like death.

More figures peopled the scene as the voice went on, smoky statues whispering in and out of place in the tableau around those that stood stone-still as the marble floor. A woman, slumped dead or unconscious; another figure reaching for her. A man pacing a circuit of the wide room restless as a panther, deep in thought, stopping before the throne, before the vast frame of a - painting? mirror? - on the far wall, before one particular one of the statues that seemed caught in a desperate lunge, and then setting his shoulders and walking away into nothingness.

The voice materialised into a young man in an aristocrat's formal mourning, pale as death and with eyes that had no pupil or were all pupil, lounging bonelessly against a pillar.

_If there's one thing I've learned in my four thousand years, it's that there is nothing new in the world under the sun. Every new generation commits the same old sins in the same old ways, and every generation they forget that what is lifted up on one tide is dragged down again by the next._

He extended a hand.

_Hello, Wyman. Your life_ has _taken a turn, hasn't it?_

_I am the Outsider, and this is my Mark ..._


End file.
